Enron: The Godfather of Kyoto

As regular readers of The Forgotten Street know, for some time I have been writing about global warming as the greatest hoax in human history. I’ve preached on and on that the whole issue revolves around money and power, and who is going to claim it.

While Al Gore and others continue to ratchet up the hysteria, and the U.N. issues another gloomy report calling for immediate action, it’s become more clear that a rising tide of prominent scientists are questioning the legitimacy of the claims made by the climate change kooks.

I’ve been particularly troubled by the whole carbon credit scam. After all, if greenhouse gases indeed are threat to mankind, shouldn’t we be working for a net reduction, not mere offsets?

That’s when the light bulb clicked for me. The carbon credit flim-flam game harkened back to the late 1990’s when similar cap and trade schemes showed up in the energy industry.

At the time I was working as a consultant for a major global energy firm, whose principal rival Enron was knee-deep in the cap and trade pollution credit business. We often speculated that Enron was building a house of cards on this Ponzi-like scheme – it turns out we were right.

Now, thanks to an enlightening investigation by a writer in New Zealand, we know that Enron played a major role in promoting the global warming hoax.

Ken Ring claims that the Kyoto Protocol to bring global management of climate change was cooked up behind closed doors at Enron as a way to cripple the coal industry and steer more industries toward natural gas, of which Enron was the United States’ biggest producer.

Two decades ago, Enron owned and operated a network of natural gas pipelines and had become a leading commodity trader buying and selling contracts and their derivatives to deliver natural gas and electricity.

Because the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments placed caps on how much pollution a fossil fuel plant could emit, Enron helped create a market for EPA’s sulphur dioxide cap-and-trade program, the forerunner of today’s carbon offset scam.

As Enron’s stock shot up, the company next turned to creating a cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide. The only problem was that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant (despite what the senile members of the Supreme Court may think). As a result, EPA had no authority to cap CO2 emissions.

With the advent of the Clinton administration in 1993, Vice President Al Gore set out to create an international regulatory system that would manage carbon dioxide. Enron immediately began to lobby Congress and the administration to give the EPA regulatory authority over CO2.

In addition, Enron began to cultivate new friends in the environmental community. From 1994 to 1996, the Enron Foundation gave nearly $1 million to the Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project promoted global warming theories. Another $1.5 million was donated to other groups advocating international controls to curb global warming, including Greenpeace.

In 1997, Enron set about to promote an international treaty to impose cuts in CO2 emissions while allowing emission rights trading. Such an agreement would produce a gigantic windfall for Enron because it would boost the usage of natural gas at the expense of coal and it would help Enron’s growing commodity trading business.

As the push for a treaty gained more support around the world, Enron CEO Ken Lay and other business leaders wrote to President Bill Clinton on September 1, 1998, asking him to create a bipartisan blue ribbon commission that would essentially shut off the scientific debate on global warming and discredit those scientists who opposed the treaty and did not support the global warming theory.

Simultaneously, Enron commissioned an internal study of global warming science, only to find the results did not support the theory. In conclusion, the report noted, “The very real possibility is that the great climate alarm could be a false alarm. The anthropogenic warming could well be less than thought and favorably distributed.”

A primary consultant for that study was NASA scientist James Hansen, the very same scientist who now castigates the Bush administration for its stance on Kyoto and who trashes scientists who dispute global warming as being in the hip pocket of big business. That certainly did not keep Mr. Hansen from cashing Enron’s check.

Ring’s investigation, as reported in Investigate magazine, notes that “…coal-burning utilities would have had to pay billions for permits because they emit more CO2 than do natural gas facilities. That would have encouraged closing coal plants in favor of natural gas or other kinds of power plants, driving up prices for those alternatives. Enron, along with other key energy companies in the so-called Clean Power Group – El Paso Corp., NiSource, Trigen Energy, and Calpine – would make money both coming and going from selling permits and then their own energy at higher prices.”

Confirmation of Ring’s story is found in a new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, written by Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Mr. Horner provides extensive documentation of Enron’s involvement behind the scenes with environmentalists (including Theresa Heinz), Bill Clinton, Al Gore and other greed-driven businesses.

Adding to Horner’s credibility is the fact that he worked in Enron’s Washington office in 1997 and witnessed much of the shenanigans himself.

So there you have the global warming story in a nutshell. It’s a story of greed, cynicism and treason, of people willing to sell their fellow citizens down the river to make money and keep their elite status at the expense of ordinary folks around the world.

What is most frightening is the astonishing number of reasonably well-educated people who have been suckered by this ultimate hoax. Just consider the five Supreme Court justices whose recent decision belies a naivete and scientific ignorance that is almost childlike.

The elite media have swallowed the global warming hoax hook, line and sinker, not knowing that one of their all-time bete noirs, Enron, was the Godfather of Kyoto.